When you feel ready to tackle that mountain of eBooks you bought but never read, give Arianna a try.

No, they’re not a therapist trained to help people with literary backlogs, but a brand-new Qt-based eBook reader for Linux.

Arianna is an efficient, streamlined app (and yes: it adapts nicely on mobile), and is not out to rival full-blown, fully-featured tools like Calibre.

Reading ePubs with Arianna

The key reader UI is basic by design as it’s job is to display content, clutter-free. You do get a on-screen progress bar to keep track of reading progress; you can flip between pages using the on-screen buttons or keyboard shortcuts.

Arianna also let search the book you’re reading for specific words or phrases, and highlights matches both on the page (with red borders) and in the search drop-down itself. A nice touch that makes it easy to “jump” where you need to go.

Remember: this app is very new. As such, you won’t find many customization options. There’s no option for single-pane reading, charing font family, dark mode, letter spacing, etc. And in full-screen mode the app doesn’t (in my test) currently hide the title bar or progress bar.

But those are all “nice” things that may be added in future updates.

Also works as an eBook library

As well as being a lean, clean ePub viewer Arianna is an eBook library manager too. It uses KDE’s file indexing service Baloo to find and sort ePubs you have on your computer or connected devices, discovering new books when downloaded.

Helpfully, the library mode in Arianna can display reading progress for titles within, and there’s a search function so you can sift through content by keyword, or browse titles based on genre, author, and/or publisher.

In all, Arianna is an elegant, efficient eBook reader for Linux. If all you need to do is read without distractions, give it a try.

• Get Arianna on Flathub